Youtube VideoCurious Film’s co-founder Darryl Ward has obviously got a thing for musicians. First it was Iggy and Orcon. Now he’s ventured stateside once more to work on a big project with musician and producer Pharrell Williams for Smirnoff’s ‘Start Pure’ campaign, which was conceived by Leo Burnett Sydney. “I liked the treatment, I thought it was a good idea, plus my agent told me this was something I should look at and so I did,” says Pharrell. “ It turns out he was right.”
Ward, who won two Cannes Grand Prix in 2010 for Orcon and Iggy and the Canon Photochains campaign with Leo Burnett Sydney, says the overall idea was to “make a track in Pharrell’s mind: auditioning, adding, subtracting instrumentation in order to get to the final goal of this track that then gets dropped in the club”.
“It was pretty clear we needed to cast real musicians, so we cast drummer Prescott Ellison, guitarist Stevie Starlight, and blues guitarist Roy Gaines, amongst others,” he says. “One of the great things about shooting this in LA was the ability to hire all these incredible instruments like a 1928 Black Diamond pearl drum set. You just can’t find things like that anymore.”
